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When I first got to Kaidan I struggled to make it through the content. I was in mostly QL 10 rare gear and my stats weren't so great. In order to make it through I had to come up with a build that had good heals and also did consistent damage, this is what I came up with...

Weapons- Blades/Blood Magic

Active Abilities

Open Vein

Bloodshot

Guts and Gory

Anaesthesia

Cold Blooded

Martial Discipline

Five Petal Lotus

Passive Abilities

Circulation

Bloodsport

Sanguineous

Elemental Force

Regeneration

Advantage Me

Gross Anatomy

Rotation

If you're first arriving in Kaidan you will most likely only have one AEGIS controller. If this is the case, then you should have that controller on your blood weapon and be spamming Open Vein til you have five resources in Blood, then hitting with Bloodshot for single targets or Guts and Gory for multiple targets. If you are stuck and can't get out of an enemies attack AOE, then hit him with Anaesthesia, that will give you time to escape. If you start to take a lot of damage you can hit Martial Discipline and regenerate some health quickly. If that's down and you still need a heal, Cold Blooded is there for those SNAFU moments. After you have destroyed your targets AEGIS, you have Five Petal Lotus to help out a bit with AOE and single target DPS.

Switching Out Abilities

I tried multiple configurations of this build and found some abilities are worth trading in certain circumstances. If I know I'm coming up to a boss, I will switch out Guts and Gory for Exsanguinate depending on how hard they are. I will also periodically remove Gross Anatomy and replace it with Contortionist if I know the Targets I'll be facing have a lot of impairs or hinders. All in all, 99% of the time I don't have to change anything. I've made it through issues 9 and 10 with very few deaths using this build. Like all builds the better you're equipment, the better your chances of survival, however this build is built specifically for someone who has just arrived and doesn't have a lot of gear or abilities. I have consistently taken out red dot targets and I can tell you I'm not the most agile player, so this build works.

Thing to keep in mind!

Movement is key to survival. Be ready to kite your targets with this build. Although it has two heals, they are on timers, so you can't sit there and allow the enemy to hit you, movement is required in almost every case. Don't stand still unless you have to. I am always moving unless I have little space or I know the enemy well enough to understand what they cast. Again movement is the key, especially when you don't have a lot of gear.

Questions

Feel free to leave questions or suggestions. Even better, if you try this build out and find a way to tweak it, let me know and I'll switch it out in the original build. This is, after all, an attempt to help others so they don't have to go through the frustration I did (RAGE! RAGE! RAGE!) when I first got to Kaidan. Remember this is for the person who's arriving with minimal gear, so if you're practicing with it, throw on some blues if you have them.

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I'd use Anaesthesia before Guts and Gory to proc the Major Pen chance.

I'd swap Five Petal Lotus for Clearing the Path or possibly Chop Shop, so I have a go-to EF consumer. At the moment it doesn't look like you have one unless you swap Exsanguinate in.

I'd probably take Cold Blooded out for Stunning Swirl or possibly Art of War for a long lasting and fast recharge impair or short impair+ force glance. Usually SS roughly equals AoW when it comes to damage reduction. SS lasts 3 seconds, AoW lasts 1 second. The two forced glances will be lost on the 2 attacks that come in second #2 and #3. Plauge can also be a fun toy.

For CB to be effective you need to have a decent amount of heal rating. I don't think I want to spend that many points in HR.

Sanguineous looks wasteful it works only with Cold Blooded and the barrier isn't big.

Elemental Force. I don't see a good hard hitting consumer for it. rather meh to waste it on a Bloodshot.

Advantage Me. I don't get it why people started to choose this instead of Immortal Spirit. Both heal for the same amount and you'll pen way more often then crit. I know, I know the EF consumer will trigger it for sure. I don't know, I'd rather take IS in case I get some downtime in the fight [like a mob casting a slow AoE which i can dodge out of] and stand there while IS heals me.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Pclav

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I'd remove sang and regeneration. Swap iron maiden and sudden return in. Was thinking of breakdown but it doesnt look like the deck will use that much blades. If you have trouble surviving try cool calm and collected instead of Gross anatomy.

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This is meant for someone starting out without the best of gear, so I sacrificed some things so you could survive with just one 1.0 Aegis controllers and not a lot of Skill Points in AEGIS. If I know I need something to break crowd control, I take Sleight of Hand or Transfuse and Abuse. At one point I had Iron Maiden and Sudden Return in, but there wasn't enough passive healing, so I took them out for that reason. Again as you gear up you can switch things out. I'm sure I'll tinker with this a bit to fine tune it for the gear I have now, but it works so well I haven't really messed with it too much.

The rotation I normally use is Open Vein-Open Vein-Open Vein-Open Vein-Open Vein-Bloodshot-Bloodshot-Bloodshot-Five Petal Lotus (once I can damage shields with Blade). I save Anesthesia for those times a boss drops an AOE I can't get away from. Again this is a kiting build and assumes you'll be constantly moving. With that in mind the one passive you should include when you get some gear is Running Circles. Rapid Getaway is nice as well.

As far as stats, when I first started using this build they weren't that high. Your main focuses should be getting Penetration to around 400 and Hit Rating there as well. To be honest my Hit Rating was only around 125 and I did fine. The passives also assume you need help in that regard.

I'm going to try some of your suggestions when I get a chance, if you have a chance ahead of time, let me know how it works.

(I've gotten 2,000 crits with QL10 rare gear using elemental force, which is one reason I kept it.

Zenren

Edited May 21, 2015 by Zenren

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I was doing some theory craft and I took out Cold Blooded, Sanguineous, and Gross Anatomy and replaced them with Rapid Getaway, Running Circles, and Cardiac Arrest. I'm going to check it out when I get home later on.

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I dont think cold blooded is worth it with low hr. You do need a bit for your passives to heal you. Atm you have 4 healing passives and cb which may heal for very little if you dont have some hr. CB wont be any good until you get high hr and that would be wasteful with any level of gear for a solo deck. If you get some hr to make your passives heal for 2 or 3 times what they do now you can dump 2 of those and replace them with dps ones. The question is: is it worth getting that much hr. I remember running with 2 heal minors (think i swapped to 1 heal major pretty fast), tank major and rest dps in 10ql blues in a balanced deck and had no problems.

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Pclav I appreciate that you have suggestions, but have you actually tried them out on the build? This build actually worked for me. This isn't a hypothetical build I threw together and posted. I've heard other people complain about survival builds that they've tried, that just didn't work for them, so I thought I'd share what worked for me. I'm sorry if it doesn't fall into the narrow constraints of what's been deemed to be "the right choice". I am just posting what works. Does it have a lot of healing passives? Yes. Why? Because people who have just made it to Kaidan may require more healing than someone who's done his share of Nightmare dungeons. This is not for the player who's been playing since 2012 had done a 100 Nightmare Dungeons, this is for the person who hasn't been playing long and is struggling in Tokyo. It's meant to compensate for poor gear. It's meant for someone who is working on getting good glyphs. I think that might be where you are misunderstanding the purpose of the build. For those who've tried it, I wouldn't mind feedback on whether it worked for you, or if you found some abilities that made it better.

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I know this is a build for people starting in Tokyo, I never took it for anything else. You totally missed the most important question I asked.

I have tried the build on an alt which has 3 issue purples and one purple weapon. 350 hit, 500 pen and a tiny bit of random crit and cpower. 2.5k HP, 1990 AR, 400ish HR.

In the end I swapped Lotus for Clearing the Path. Didn't like that I have to be facing the enemy to use Lotus, plus CtP has a good chance to pen and trigger Immortal Spirit. Dropped Martial Discipline for Turn the Tables. Dropped Cold Blooded for Cardiac Arrest. I did change the passives to what I posted before.

This works for me.

That's because that matches my characters talismans. That's what I've been asking before. HR to AR to HP ratio.

With the HR I have my 2 HoTs heal me for 55 every second and I pretty much got a 100% uptime. IF I wasn't using any heal talismans I'd be healed for 34 only. I'd have to have Advantage me to put that up to 54 and it'd pretty much proc only on EF. By swapping my dps tali to a HR tali I loose about 10% damage but gain a passive slot, in this case Iron Maiden. With that I end the fights faster than if I had that 10% damage more.

This is not a question of "the right choice". This is about balancing a build around the stats you have. A third person can come into this discussion and say that they had to put up 700 HR and 5k HP and put 5 healing passives for it to work. However there is a moment where you can't "outlive" mobs You'll just kill them too slowly and slowly they'll bring you down.

Edited May 24, 2015 by Pclav

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Well thank you Pclav... that's what I was hoping to find out. I have also dropped Cold Blooded for Cardiac Arrest... I normally sidestep using the mouse, so the whole targeting behind thing never bothered me. My Hit Rating was around 250-300, not so great, but I had 400 penetration which offset it. I still didn't glance that often, so I never bothered to pump up hit rating.

I don't care for Turn the Tables, I used it for a long time, but it doesn't seem to heal enough. Martial Discipline, with a single Heal Talisman will heal me 50-75%, which seemed worth it. In regards to clearing the path, it was a PBAoE, which is why I chose Lotus over it. I found getting point blank to anything in Tokyo to be detrimental to my health.

So my Healing Rate was around 600-Hit Rate was 250-300-Health around 3500. I did end up taking out some of the healing passives as well,

Anyways, after more tinkering and having a decent hit rate of 400, penetration rate of 400, and Healing rate of around, again 400, I used the following build and found it to work well against single targets and multiple targets..

Active Abilities

Open Vein

Five Petal Lotus

Bloodshot

Exsanguinate

Infection

Martial Discipline

Cardiac Arrest

Passive Abilities

Immortal Spirit

Bloodsport

One in the Chamber

Elemental Force

Regeneration

Mind Over Matter

Gross Anatomy

Again, this will provide a boost in survival, but also required me to have better starting stats. I suggest that people use green hit rating and penetration rating glyphs to boost blue and epic talismans if they have boosts to other stats. If you're hesitant, then you can take the hit to damage for awhile til you find some epic talismans with epic glyphs with hit and penetration (I did).

Sorry if I came across a bit flustered, but people keep telling me to change things, but never seemed to have tried anything out. Thanks for taking the time to try the build and I appreciate your feedback.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Zenren

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Again, this will provide a boost in survival, but also required me to have better starting stats. I suggest that people use green hit rating and penetration rating glyphs to boost blue and epic talismans if they have boosts to other stats. If you're hesitant, then you can take the hit to damage for awhile til you find some epic talismans with epic glyphs with hit and penetration (I did).

Sorry if I came across a bit flustered, but people keep telling me to change things, but never seemed to have tried anything out. Thanks for taking the time to try the build and I appreciate your feedback.

​

I don't crit enough to support this version of the deck. My only reliable crit hit is on EF.

I'd either swap Gross Anatomy for Rapid Getaway, but that adds only 10% to consumers only.

Or I'd swap Mind over Matter to Incision. Almost same damage all in all, but procs on pen. And One In the Chamber for Sudden Return, same reasons.

I don't see DoTs as a good damage source in a deck. I get one, so I'm able to proc affliction based stuff and that's it. Bloodsport is enough. Gross Anatomy can proc only once a second anyway, so Bloodsport covers that. Most of the damage in this deck comes from blood, so even getting Thicker then Water will outdamage a second DoT. Or Iron Maiden to get more pen for Immortal Spirit and Sudden Return.